HOUSTON - (July 7, 2015) - Companies that want to increase customers' loyalty and get their repeat business would do well to understand the nuanced ways in which and reasons why a customer is committed to that company, according to a recent study by marketing experts at Rice University and Fordham University. The research provides a strategic blueprint for developing customer commitment. The researchers tested a customer-commitment model that has five dimensions -- affective, normative, economic, forced and habitual. They said previous research has used an "insufficient" ...

LAWRENCE -- A wide-ranging study of gains and losses of populations of bird species across Mexico in the 20th century shows shifts in temperature due to global climate change are the primary environmental influence on the distributions of bird species. "Of all drivers examined ... only temperature change had significant impacts on avifaunal turnover; neither precipitation change nor human impacts on landscapes had significant effects," wrote the authors of the study, which appeared recently in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances. Using analytical techniques from ...

URBANA, Ill. - A recent study looked at marijuana and alcohol use in people between the ages of 18 and 24. It's probably not surprising that the results show a drastic increase in alcohol consumption in people just over 21; after all, that's the minimum legal age to drink. What University of Illinois economist Ben Crost found remarkable is that, at the same age, there was an equally dramatic drop in marijuana use. "Alcohol appears to be a substitute for marijuana. This sudden decrease in the use of marijuana is because they suddenly have easy access to alcohol," Crost ...

ATLANTA--Structural brain abnormalities in patients with schizophrenia, providing insight into how the condition may develop and respond to treatment, have been identified in an internationally collaborative study led by a Georgia State University scientist. Scientists at more than a dozen locations across the United States and Europe analyzed brain MRI scans from 2,028 schizophrenia patients and 2,540 healthy controls, assessed with standardized methods at 15 centers worldwide. The findings, published in Molecular Psychiatry, help further the understanding of the mental ...

Researchers from the University of Houston found that some natural gas wells, compressor stations and processing plants in the Barnett Shale leak far more methane (CH4) than previously estimated, potentially offsetting the climate benefits of natural gas. The study is one of 11 papers published in the July 7 edition of Environmental Science & Technology, all looking at fugitive methane emissions in the Barnett Shale. That region, site of the first widespread shale development in the United States, includes Dallas-Fort Worth and almost two dozen counties to the west ...

Effectiveness shown in tests on ovarian and bowel cancer Drug can shut down a cancer cell's metabolism Developed by researchers at the University of Warwick's Warwick Cancer Research Centre Tests conducted by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute's Cancer Genome Project New drug could be cheaper to produce and less harmful to healthy cells Tests have shown that a new cancer drug, FY26, is 49 times more potent than the clinically used treatment Cisplatin. Based on a compound of the rare precious metal osmium and developed by researchers at the University of Warwick's ...

Professor Richard Lilford and Dr Yen-Fu Chen of the University's Warwick Medical School, raised the issue following a study that states hospital weekend death risk is common in several developed countries - not just England Professor Lilford, said: "Understanding this is an extremely important task since it is large, at about 10% in relative risk terms and 0.4% in percentage point terms. This amounts to about 160 additional deaths in a hospital with 40,000 discharges per year. "But how much of the observed increase results from service failure? And here is the rub, ...

This news release is available in German. Jülich, 7 July - Using a single molecule as a sensor, scientists in Jülich have successfully imaged electric potential fields with unrivalled precision. The ultrahigh-resolution images provide information on the distribution of charges in the electron shells of single molecules and even atoms. The 3D technique is also contact-free. The first results achieved using "scanning quantum dot microscopy" have been published in the current issue of Physical Review Letters. The related publication was chosen as ...

A yearlong study of first-time smartphone users by researchers at Rice University and the U.S. Air Force found that users felt smartphones were actually detrimental to their ability to learn. The research paper "You Can Lead a Horse to Water But You Cannot Make Him Learn: Smartphone Use in Higher Education" appeared in a recent edition of the British Journal of Educational Technology. The research reveals the self-rated impact of smartphones among the users. "Smartphone technology is penetrating world markets and becoming abundant in most college settings," said Philip ...

Today in Nature Communications, scientists at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) provide molecular details about Seckel Syndrome, a rare disease that causes microcephaly, or small brain, and growth delays. A joint study conducted by Travis Stracker and Jens Lüders indicates that the protein CEP63 plays a key role during brain development as it is involved in the correct division of stem cells in this organ. Furthermore, the researchers have discovered that CEP63 is associated with sperm production--an unknown function until now. Rescuing microcephaly ...

This news release is available in Spanish. Mikel Zubizarreta, a member of the UPV/EHU's IT 781-13 group, highlights the advantages of timber in building works: "Although it is not as tough as other materials used in structures, it is a better insulator, in other words, it is more energy-efficient and less dense so the structure weighs less. On the other hand, timber is a renewable material -trees are planted and grown and forests are a CO2 sink- and is abundant in the Basque Country (nearly 55% of its surface area consists of forests)." Yet timber is used much less ...

PHILADELPHIA - Many people believe that phase I trials with healthy volunteers are very risky and because they pose risks with no benefits, unethical. But how risky are such trials? Less than 1% of 11,000 healthy volunteers who participated in 394 phase I trials for new drugs experienced serious complications, according to a new meta-analysis of participants in non-cancer, phase I medication trials. In addition, none of the volunteers died or suffered persistent disabilities linked to the experimental drugs. In the largest study of its kind, researchers found only 34 (0.31%) ...

Washington, D.C. - July 6, 2015 - Those bacteria that require iron walk a tightrope. Iron is essential for their growth, but too much iron can damage DNA and enzymes through oxidation. Therefore, bacteria have machinery to maintain their intracellular iron within a range that is healthy for them. Now Theresa D. Ho, PhD, and Craig D. Ellermeier, PhD shed new light on how the pathogen, Clostridium difficile, which is the most common cause of hospital-acquired infectious diarrhea, regulates iron. The research is published online ahead of print July 6 in the Journal of Bacteriology, ...

While nitrous oxide gas has been used recreationally and medically for more than 200 years - originally for its euphoric and then for its pain relieving and anesthetic properties - the mechanism behind its effects on the brain has been poorly understood. A report from investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) finds that the EEG patterns of patients receiving high doses of nitrous oxide differ significantly from those of the same patients when they had received ether-based inhaled anesthetics earlier in the procedures, findings that - along with suggesting how ...

WASHINGTON, July 7, 2015 - In 1962, an underground fire started in the coal-mining town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. Fifty-three years later, that fire still burns. In this week's episode of Reactions, we explain the history and science behind the Centralia mine fire. Does anyone still live there? How could the fire keep burning for so long, and why hasn't it been extinguished? From a chemical standpoint, what is fire, anyway? It's all answered in our latest video: https://youtu.be/fsgqy5FYP2c.INFORMATION: Subscribe to the series at http://bit.ly/ACSReactions, and follow ...

HONOLULU - Aspirin may inhibit the growth of mesothelioma, an aggressive and deadly asbestos-related cancer, University of Hawai'i Cancer Center researchers have found. The finding could eventually give doctors and patients a potential new tool to fight against this devastating disease, which kills about 3,200 people a year nationwide, and advance knowledge of how to fight other cancers. The study published in Cell Death and Disease showed that aspirin slows down the growth of mesothelioma by blocking the carcinogenic effects of the inflammatory molecule, High-Mobility ...

Researchers have developed a new design for a cloaking device that overcomes some of the limitations of existing "invisibility cloaks." In a new study, electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego have designed a cloaking device that is both thin and does not alter the brightness of light around a hidden object. The technology behind this cloak will have more applications than invisibility, such as concentrating solar energy and increasing signal speed in optical communications. "Invisibility may seem like magic at first, but its underlying concepts ...

University of Adelaide researchers are developing a laser system for fast, non-invasive, onsite breath analysis for disease, potentially enabling screening for a range of diseases including diabetes, infections and various cancers in the future. The researchers have developed an instrument they equate to an "optical dog's nose" which uses a special laser to measure the molecular content of a sample of gas. "Rather than sniffing out a variety of smells as a dog would, the laser system uses light to "sense" the range of molecules that are present in the sample," says ...

KUNMING, 7 July 2015 - Increasing amounts of environmentally valuable and protected land are being cleared for rubber plantations that are economically unsustainable, new research suggests. More widespread monitoring is vital to design policy that protects livelihoods and environments. The research was recently published in Global Environmental Change and constitutes a joint effort by scientists at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) East and Central Asia office, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the University of Singapore and the ...

A piece of deep frozen ice and electronic gadgets may seem to have little connection (except that they are both 'cool' to have on you), but ice could now play a role in opening a new era in the electronic industry where conducting polymers, simply put plastics with electrical properties, are in great demand for practical applications. Chemists at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Korea, have discovered an innovative method to form two-dimensional polyaniline (PANI) nanosheets using ice as a hard template. The product, called PANI-ICE, is reported ...

Today theoretical physicists are facing the difficulty that General Relativity is not (pertubatively) renormalizable, and find that it is very hard to construct the quantum theory of gravity with LI. A possible solution is to break the LI in the ultraviolet (UV) region, so that the theory is renormalizable and unitary. However, the invariance should be recovered in the infrared (IR), so that all of the gravitational experiments in the IR can be satisfied. According to this idea, Horava proposed a Horava-Lifshitz (HL) gravity without LI [P. Horava, Phys. Rev. D 79 (2009) ...

Recent experiments have successfully tested Einstein's general theory of relativity in a variety of ways and to remarkable precision. These experiments included spacecraft Doppler tracking, planetary radar ranging, lunar and satellite laser ranging, as well as a number of dedicated gravitational experiments in space and many ground based efforts. How can computational models keep up with the ever improving accuracy of these missions? Finding a solution to the Einstein's gravitational field equations in the case of an unperturbed one-body problem is quite a simple task. ...

This news release is available in Japanese. The Earth's magnetic field periodically reverses such that the north magnetic pole becomes the south magnetic pole. The latest reversal is called by geologists the Matuyama-Brunhes boundary (MBB), and occurred approximately 780,000 years ago. The MBB is extremely important for calibrating the ages of rocks and the timing of events that occurred in the geological past; however, the exact age of this event has been imprecise because of uncertainties in the dating methods that have been used. A team of researchers based in ...

July 6, 2015, Shenzhen, China-- Mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) database demonstrated its great value on detecting wild bees in UK farms via mitochondrial metagenomics pipeline, a new approach developed by scientists from the China National Genebank (CNGB), BGI-Shenzhen. The study published today in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution shows that, with mitogenome references, collecting wild bees, extracting their mixed DNA, and directly reading the DNA of the resultant 'bee soup' could finally make large-scale bee monitoring programmes feasible. This new research ...

Chicago (July 7, 2015)- Switzerland has a long history of trying to be as self-sufficient and energy independent as possible. Although its energy supply system has served it well in the past, the country is now looking to turn away from its reliance on nuclear power and seeks to compensate for the energy lost from hydropower as a result of climate change. In the latest issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by SAGE, Dominic Notter of Empa discusses how the country aims to address this transition, finding a new supply mix that combines energy conservation, ...